The six-word memoir is ascribed to Hemingway. He was said to have written the now famous story in six simple words: “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”

Whether or not Hemingway wrote these words, flash fiction and the short novel have never been the same.

Inspired by the six-word story, my blogging friend, Eli, over at Coachdaddyblog.com invites a group of friends and fellow bloggers over every month to write a six-word sentence in response to a particular prompt. It’s always so much fun to read what prompt he’s come up with this time and how people have responded.

This time he asked a group of us for a new year’s resolution.

I knew exactly what I wanted to write:

Reread Proust and search for time.

My literary new year’s goal this year is to reread Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. I read it as a university student but haven’t revisited it since.

all photos by reading interrupted.com

It’s still a big part of my life, however. So many books I read make references to it. And, more significantly, it’s my mother’s favorite literary work and she refers to the characters much as she would distant relatives, the stories vaguely merging in my mind with the stories she tells me of our ancestors.

I’m not sure I will reread the whole thing, but certainly the first part, some favorite passages in others, and then I will dip in and out of the story with a disregard for chronology that would normally make me balk.

I even have some of the text on audiocassette so I can dust off my old Walkman (which for some unknown reason I have kept after all these years… it seems like it should be in a museum by now) and have the story read to me as I walk down the street in 80s style.

Do you have any literary goals this year?

(Check out Eli’s wonderful blog and read more six-word New Year resolutions here: Coach Daddy Blog)